Reducing Unmanaged Applications

FlexNet Manager Suite 2024 R1 (On-Premises)

This approach helps to control your team's work focus.

At first, your list of unmanaged applications (License Compliance > Unmanaged Applications) may be far too large to work with conveniently. If there are several operators working with this list, each can have their own filters that give a personalized list to work on. If you want to reduce the set of available applications to a common pool for operators to choose from, you can use the following approach. It is only necessary to do this once, to bring the list under initial control. As a worked example, imagine that you want everyone to concentrate on updating all licenses for a forthcoming Microsoft audit. Everything else can be deferred for the time being.

To create filters for the unmanaged applications list:

1. On the Unmanaged Applications page, change the rows per page setting to 1000, or a number high enough to include all your unmanaged applications where possible.
   This allows you to change as many records at once as possible, reducing your configuration effort.
2. Create an advanced filter for the inverse of the condition you want to display (see Creating an Advanced Filter).
   For example, to prepare for a Microsoft audit, you may need to focus on commercial applications published by Microsoft. For the moment, we need to hide these desirable applications while we focus on moving away all the others. Since the advanced filter does not allow for starting a filter with "Not", we need a more complex filter specification to reveal everything except the Microsoft commercial applications:

   (Publisher Does not contain Microsoft
   AND
   Classification Does not equal Commercial)
   
   OR
   
   (Publisher Contains Microsoft
   AND
   Classification Does not equal Commercial)
   
   OR
   
   (Publisher Does not contain Microsoft
   AND
   Classification Equals Commercial)

   In the Advanced filter builder, the conditions look like this:
   
   When you click OK, the desirable applications are hidden, and the (temporarily) undesirable applications remain.
3. In the header of the list, click the selection box above the left column.
   This selects all the applications displayed in this list. (It does not select any applications on later pages of the list that are not yet displayed.)
4. Above the list, on the right, select Change status, and from the list of options, choose Deferred.
   After a moment, the selected applications disappear from this list (they have moved to the separate list of Deferred Applications.) Any remaining applications that meet the filter specification on the Unmanaged Applications list are displayed in their place.
5. If necessary, repeat the selection and status change until there are No results for applications matching your filter.
6. In the filter row above the Unmanaged Applications list (on the left), click the x to remove the filter.
   The list refreshes and displays only the desirable applications that are your current focus. Individual operators may now further filter this list (for example, filtering for particular application names) to suit their individual tasks; but the overall to-do list is fixed on commercial Microsoft applications. To bring one of these applications under management, you can:

   • Use the Create a license button on this page to manually license the application; or locate, import, and process purchases relating to the application.
   • Select the licensed application, and use the Change status button to mark it either Authorized (when it is permitted in your enterprise) or Unauthorized (if it is not permitted, and must be uninstalled before the audit). The change of status removes the application from this to-do list.

When you have completed this to-do list, you can switch to the list of Deferred Applications, filter to the next set of applications to work on (such as those with the next focus publisher), select them all and change their status to Unmanaged. (Remember to repeat this over multiple pages of the list if necessary.) Those selected apps are then restored to the Unmanaged Applications to form your next to-do list.